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The cover page of the journal "Papers on Language & Literature" is presented.

For many years Brian Abel Ragen entertained dining companions with stories about D.C. Collier Junior High. It was evidently not the sort of institution that one might have expected a [...]

As Papers on Language and Literature enters its 51st year, it remains committed, as strongly as ever, to publishing rigorous scholarship. PLL has always sought to break through boundaries and [...]

I rise with divided heart to speak in honor of Alvin Sullivan, my friend and colleague of almost 25 years. The American poet, Hyam Plutzik, writing a Requiem for a [...]

This January saw the retirement of Jean Vassier, who had served as PLL's business manager for many years. During 37 years at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, she had held [...]

Introduction Given the paucity of material offering in-depth scholarly analyses of experimental film and video from both traditional and revisionist theoretical perspectives, this special issue of Papers on Language and [...]

Rambsy II, Howard. Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2020. 223 pages. Paperback. $29.50 In 'Born in a Mighty Bad Land': The Violent Man [...]

O.V. Vijayan (1930-2005) is regarded as one of the most gifted novelists to contribute to the literature of the South Indian state of Kerala. His The Legends of Khasak (1969) [...]

Zitkala-Sa's autobiographical stories, titled 'School Days of an Indian Girl' and 'An Indian Teacher among Indians,' appeared initially in The Atlantic Monthly (1900) and were subsequently compiled with her fictional [...]

Federico, Annette R., ed. My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice. U Missouri P, 2020. 316 pages. Hardcover. $36. My Victorian Novel, edited by Annette Federico, gives us [...]

'All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.' Toni Morrison, 'The Site of Memory' On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, a [...]

DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE FOREIGN In their edited volume The Foreign in International Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations (2014), Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda, and Barbara Pezzotti define detective fiction as 'a [...]

In their latest novel, The Death of Vivek Oji (2020), Nigerian author Akwaeke Emezi delves into the exploration of the violent death of one of its protagonists, Vivek Oji. Through [...]

Aramburu, Diana. Resisting Invisibility: Detectingthe Female Body in Spanish Crime Fiction. U of Toronto P, 2019. 296 pages. Hardcover. $30.82. In recent years, scholars from around the world and from [...]

Joyce, Laura, and Henry Sutton, editors. Domestic Noir: The New Face of 21st Century CrimeFiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 292 pages. Paperback. $95.50. Domestic Noir is an edited collection of essays [...]

As two figures that exist on the margins of society and culture, the antiheroine and the stranger are uncannily alike in their boundary-crossing and liminal occupation of physical and metaphorical [...]

Despite the publication of Hubert Poppel's 2001 study, La novela policiaca en Colombia [The Detective Novel in Colombia], local writers have not demonstrated the kind of sustained engagement with the [...]

Crime fiction is a 'strange' genre traditionally situated at the paradoxical coordinates of best-selling success and academic marginality. (1) Often considered a subliterary type and associated with low-class entertainment, thrillers, [...]

Since her first novel, Lightning Field, appeared in 2001, Dana Spiotta has published new novels in five-year increments, with Eat the Document in 2006, Stone Arabia in 2011, Innocents and [...]

Emma Sutton and Tsung-Han Tsai, eds. Twenty-First-Century Readings of E. M. Forster's Maurice. Liverpool UP, 2020. 296 pages. Hardcover. [pounds sterling]85.00/ $120.00 In the first book-length study of Forster's posthumously-published [...]

The fascination with nostalgia has marked British culture, and indeed the whole of European culture, from the 1970s onwards, asserts David Lowenthal (36). The currency of nostalgia notwithstanding, the phenomenon [...]

Fretwell, Erica. Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling. Duke UP, 2020. 336 pages. Paperback. $28. Erica Fretwell's Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling examines [...]

Fiona Kidman is one of New Zealand's premier contemporary novelists with a writing career spanning about half a century. A prolific writer in multiple genres, including the novel, short story, [...]

'Women and Humour in the Long Nineteenth Century' British Association for Victorian Studies Conference 23rd - 26th June 2021 Online Event Can women be funny? After a 2017 conference on [...]

More than a one observer has called the work of Julian Barnes 'odd' or 'strange' (Greaney 225). Part of this surely comes from the form his books tend to take--some [...]

When we began collecting medieval texts featuring positive human-animal relations for our annotated anthologies, (1s we were surprised at the vast number of such texts our search uncovered, particularly in [...]

Tankard, Alex. Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth Centur y Literature: Invalid Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 238 + ix pages. Hardcover. $99.99. Alex Tankard's Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth [...]

Pugh, Tison. Chaucer's Losers, Nintendo's Children, and Other Forays into Queer Ludonarratology. U of Nebraska, 2019. 282 pages. Hardcover. $55. Tison Pugh's monograph explores the play of queerness at the [...]

Brouillette, Sarah. UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary. Stanford UP, 2019. 192 pages. Paperback. $25. Sarah Brouillette's UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary is a monumental work of [...]

Emily Dickinson's poetry presents two conflicting strands of thought featuring a paradox of power and powerlessness. Some of her personae are small, meek and powerless, submitting to a larger force; [...]

Rachel Ferguson's eccentric 1931 novel, The Brontes Went to Woolworths, troubles many assumptions about modernism and the middlebrow and modernity's distinctions between these categories. The novel's meaning emerges only amidst [...]

Fielder, Brigitte, and Jonathan Senchyne, eds. Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print. U of Wisconsin P, 2019. The History of Print and Digital Culture. 318 pages. [...]

Goyal, Yogita. Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery. New York UP, 2019. 268+ viii pages. Paperback. $30. In this ambitious book, Yogita Goyal brings together a corpus of best-selling [...]

Friedman, Dustin. Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self. Johns Hopkins UP, 2019. 248 pages. Paperback. $34.95. In Before Queer Theory, Dustin Friedman convincingly traces theoretical underpinnings of the [...]

Though seemingly counter-intuitive, the violence of enslavement has both sublime and traumatic dimensions that can be considered in relation to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [...]

The article discusses highlights of Caliban's Mirror: The 2022 Wilde and Joyce Symposium, held at the Trinity Long Room in Dublin, Ireland on May 5-7, 2022. Topics included the literary works of authors Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, influence of non-human entities on conceptions and constructions of the human, modernism and the politics of punitive child removal, and modern Irish art.

George Sand's Indiana and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth share a guiding interest in the function of appearances that--considered within the context of literary realism's development--can be seen as contributing to the gradually dominating trope of exteriority in which fictional characters' identities and actions are ineluctably determined and defined by such external forces as society, language, aesthetics, and commerce. The failure of Sand's Raymon de Ramière and Wharton's Lily Bart to realize themselves as independently empowered individuals exemplifies literary realism's reassessment, closely tied to the rise of sociology as a discipline, of the longstanding, romantic tradition of a person's potential to be a selfdetermining entity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To examine how light skin, especially among Indian women, has powerful social capital, this essay exhumes the politics of colorism and female identity that is palpably present in both cultural and literary discourses of the twentieth century. It aims to uphold three goals: one, by engaging with anthropological and historical readings, establish the prevalence of colorism in colonial and postcolonial India; two, by highlighting epidermal hierarchies within popular Indian culture, address how skin color has inevitably governed women's personal and professional lives; and three, by harnessing the subversive potential in select works of twentieth century Indian writers--Santa Chatterjee, Munshi Premchand, K. Saraswathi Amma, Kamala Markandaya, and Arundhati Roy--who hail from various cultural and geographic backgrounds, demonstrate how the supremacy of light skin is a pan-Indian phenomenon that needs to be resisted. Finally, this essay argues that the hegemony of light skin, which continues to adversely affect Indian women's self-esteem, must be both confronted and quashed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to their remarkable ability to retrain perception and create an evocative 'illusion of preserving nature,' avant-garde film and VR nature videos often draw on slow and ecocinema aesthetics to [...]

Narratives of escape and transcendence are recurring threads in contemporary media art and cinema. These ideas not only permeate the art world, humanities, and filmic representations, but are fixtures of [...]

Remes, Justin. Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing. Columbia UP, 2020. 264 pages. Hardback, $95; paperback, $28. Justin Remes's second publication, Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing [...]

Jacobs, Steven, Eva Hielscher, and Anthony Kinik, eds. The City Symphony Phenomena: Art, Cinema, and Urban Modernity. Routledge, 2019. 360 pp. Hardback. $160. Steven Jacobs, Eva Hielscher, and Anthony Kinik's [...]

Laura Kraning is a contemporary moving image artist from the United States who inquires into landscape using non-fictional and experimental modes of filmmaking. Her films typically navigate strange, remote, or [...]

There is nothing like distance to Remove us from all ugliness. Gaspard-Felix 'Nadar' Tournachon (qtd. in Frizot 385) The city gave birth to the moving image, and the moving image [...]

MacDonald, Scott. The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Avant-Doc 2). Oxford UP, 2019. 504 pages. Hardback, [pounds sterling]93.00; paperback, [pounds sterling]25.99. The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Avant-Doc [...]

It would not be an error to say that the films of Joseph Cornell are both renowned and little known. Historians of the avant-garde and students of film, especially those [...]

Gifford, James. A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic. ELS Editions, 2018. 287 pages. Paperback. $28.00. If one were to construct a Venn diagram of ideal readers for [...]

Travelling, emigration, and immigration have featured so prominently in Paul Muldoon's poetry that his can deservedly be called an art of the late modern wanderer, for whom 'there is no [...]

When Lucky Jim first appeared in 1954, it received varied responses from different classes of readers and critics. Of course, the general response was favorable. It was positively reviewed by [...]

Orgelfinger, Gail. Joan of Arc in the English Imagination, 1429-1829. Penn State UP, 2019. 248 pages. Hardcover. $89.95. The story of Joan of Arc, told over and over since her [...]